Thursday, May 22, 2008

Cloverfield (2007)

I have finally made my peace with the fact of not seeing the-most-anticipated-film-since-Blair-Witch, or otherwise known as Cloverfield this past weekend.

Like many of my fellow cineastes, I was in awe of the teaser trailer and was actually expecting something really juicy, meaty like an In'n'Out Burger. When some of the plot points began to emerge online about the Godzilla effect and the post 9/11 paranoia and all that - a little bit like Shyamalan's The Village (2004) really - I began to lose interest. Has my opinion changed? Not really.

Let's give credit where credit's due - Cloverfield has killer action scenes and a rather gothic monster CGI effects. It's at these moments where I think the film is awesome and deserves the accolades of "groundbreaking" and/or "revolutionary". The short running time and the 'documentary' gimmick also works well to up the ante and give a verisimilitude that we learned to expect from action films post-Batman Begins (2005).

However, I couldn't give a donkey's left ear to the story on the screen. I mean, who cares? The idea of introducing a hero's journey into this belittles any kind of verisimilitude (that word again) that the film otherwise claims to have. I want to see more of the spider-thingies that the monster ejaculated from its body. I want to smell the napalm in the morning. I want to see more hot chicks imploding after being bitten by those spider-thingies. I want more running in the dark tunnel from those spider-thingies...I just want more spider-thingies!

I'm not going to get into the whole argument about how the dude managed to make every shot so perfect - that's just silly talking and silly criticising. Whatever it is, it has to have some sort of artistic input to make it worthwhile for us to watch. Otherwise, the 'film' would have lasted for 5 minutes - drop the camera and run.

On second thought a great sequel would be another camera (dropped by somebody) that keeps on recording all the stuff that was going on from one weird angle ... that would be awesome.